This is the question The Last Musician of Auschwitz sets out to answer, through the story of 99-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and a handful of other extraordinary victims of Auschwitz who played and created music in the most brutal and dehumanising situations, amid the terrors of the Holocaust.
The camp system was designed to degrade everyone imprisoned there. Yet remarkably, within this industrialised hellscape, the Nazis organised official orchestras – offering a lifeline to a tiny handful of men and women, including Anita. For all the characters in this film, whose fates converged at Auschwitz in different, terrible ways, music mattered deeply – it was a means of survival; an act of resistance; or a way to feel, fleetingly, human again.
This will be a moving, surprising and sometimes shocking film – in form an innovative hybrid of observational documentary, expert interview, archive, highly stylised drama and music. On the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, the film will reveal how music itself can testify profoundly both to what these musicians of the Holocaust endured and how they tried to endure it.
Anita Lasker-Wallfish, the only living musician to have played in one of the Auschwitz orchestras – in an interview she claims will be her last – frames the film. As well as the endemic barbarism of the death camp, she also witnessed the Nazis’ abuse of the art she loved first hand - and was forced to comply with it. Now, her son Raphael, a professional cellist himself, is taken by the film crew to perform at Auschwitz – a powerful reminder that despite the Nazis best efforts to annihilate the Jews of Europe and their culture, they failed.
Alongside Anita the film will weave the stories of four other musicians, now dead but whose music and words, live on. Between them they illustrate the infernal pull Auschwitz exacted over Europe: from Krakow, classically trained pianist Adam Kopycinski, from Paris composer Szymon Laks; from Berlin choir master Martin Rosebery D’Arguto; and from Prague, singer songwriter, Ilse Weber. The film will also explore how an anonymous Roma song survived the camp, passed by word of mouth, though tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti died there.
To amplify these stories, a unique programme of songs and instrumental works will be embedded throughout the film, most conceived by the featured musicians in the shadow of the Holocaust. Each will be specially filmed in site-specific performances, several against the backdrop of Auschwitz today. Two songs by Ilse Weber are newly discovered works, never performed since the war, and a poignant lullaby by Adam Kopycinski, written in Auschwitz itself, is recorded by us for the very first time.
The rescue of these people’s stories and their music from oblivion is largely thanks to the devotion of family, friends and dedicated scholars – often with their own astonishing tales to tell. In particular, the film will explore the feats of Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish camp survivor who stored hundreds of songs simply in his head, intent on one day singing them to the world. And we join, Francesco Lotoro, an Italian who today travels the world in search of memories of Holocaust music, in a race against time before the last survivors die.